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Reconsidering Southern Labor History

Author : Matthew Hild

Publisher : University Press of Florida

Page : 260 pages

File Size : 20,3 MB

Release : 2020-11-03

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 0813065771

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Book Description

United Association for Labor Education Best Book Award The American Dream of reaching success through sheer sweat and determination rings false for countless members of the working classes. This volume shows that many of the difficulties facing workers today have deep roots in the history of the exploitation of labor in the South. Contributors make the case that the problems that have long beset southern labor, including the legacy of slavery, low wages, lack of collective bargaining rights, and repression of organized unions, have become the problems of workers across the country. Spanning nearly all of U.S. history, the essays in this collection range from West Virginia to Florida to Texas. They examine vagrancy laws in the early republic, inmate labor at state penitentiaries, mine workers and union membership, and strikes and the often-violent strikebreaking that followed. They also look at pesticide exposure among farmworkers, labor activism during the civil rights movement, and foreign-owned auto factories in the rural South. They distinguish between different struggles experienced by women and men, as well as by African American, Latino, and white workers. The broad chronological sweep and comprehensive nature of Reconsidering Southern Labor History set this volume apart from any other collection on the topic in the past forty years. Presenting the latest trends in the study of the working-class South by a new generation of scholars, this volume is a surprising revelation of the historical forces behind the labor inequalities inherent today. Contributors: David M. Anderson | Deborah Beckel | Thomas Brown | Dana M. Caldemeyer | Adam Carson | Theresa Case | Erin L. Conlin | Brett J. Derbes | Maria Angela Diaz | Alan Draper | Matthew Hild | Joseph E. Hower | T.R.C. Hutton | Stuart MacKay | Andrew C. McKevitt | Keri Leigh Merritt | Bethany Moreton | Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan | Michael Sistrom | Joseph M. Thompson | Linda Tvrdy



Civil Rights Unionism

Author : Robert R. Korstad

Publisher : UNC Press Books

Page : 571 pages

File Size : 16,31 MB

Release : 2003-11-20

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 0807862525

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Book Description

Drawing on scores of interviews with black and white tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Robert Korstad brings to life the forgotten heroes of Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America-CIO. These workers confronted a system of racial capitalism that consigned African Americans to the basest jobs in the industry, perpetuated low wages for all southerners, and shored up white supremacy. Galvanized by the emergence of the CIO, African Americans took the lead in a campaign that saw a strong labor movement and the reenfranchisement of the southern poor as keys to reforming the South--and a reformed South as central to the survival and expansion of the New Deal. In the window of opportunity opened by World War II, they blurred the boundaries between home and work as they linked civil rights and labor rights in a bid for justice at work and in the public sphere. But civil rights unionism foundered in the maelstrom of the Cold War. Its defeat undermined later efforts by civil rights activists to raise issues of economic equality to the moral high ground occupied by the fight against legalized segregation and, Korstad contends, constrains the prospects for justice and democracy today.





Labor's Story in the United States

Author : Philip Yale Nicholson

Publisher : Temple University Press

Page : 382 pages

File Size : 36,7 MB

Release : 2004

Category : Business & Economics

ISBN : 9781592132393

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Book Description

In this, the first broad historical overview of labor in the United States in twenty years, Philip Nicholson examines anew the questions, the villains, the heroes, and the issues of work in America. Unlike recent books that have covered labor in the twentieth century,Labor's Story in the United Stateslooks at the broad landscape of labor since before the Revolution. In clear, unpretentious language, Philip Yale Nicholson considers American labor history from the perspective of institutions and people: the rise of unions, the struggles over slavery, wages, and child labor, public and private responses to union organizing. Throughout, the book focuses on the integral relationship between the strength of labor and the growth of democracy, painting a vivid picture of the strength of labor movements and how they helped make the United States what it is today.Labor's Story in the United Stateswill become an indispensable source for scholars and students. Author note:Philip Yale Nicholsonis Professor of History at Nassau Community College and Adjunct Professor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Long Island Extension. He is the author ofWho Do We Think We Are? Race and Nation in the Modern World.



The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture

Author : Amy Louise Wood

Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press

Page : 320 pages

File Size : 25,95 MB

Release : 2011-11-14

Category : Reference

ISBN : 0807869287

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Book Description

Much of the violence that has been associated with the United States has had particular salience for the South, from its high homicide rates, or its bloody history of racial conflict, to southerners' popular attachment to guns and traditional support for capital punishment. With over 95 entries, this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture explores the most significant forms and many of the most harrowing incidences of violence that have plagued southern society over the past 300 years. Following a detailed overview by editor Amy Wood, the volume explores a wide range of topics, such as violence against and among American Indians, labor violence, arson, violence and memory, suicide, and anti-abortion violence. Taken together, these entries broaden our understanding of what has driven southerners of various classes and various ethnicities to commit acts of violence, while addressing the ways in which southerners have conceptualized that violence, responded to it, or resisted it. This volume enriches our understanding of the culture of violence and its impact on ideas about law and crime, about historical tradition and social change, and about race and gender--not only in the South but in the nation as a whole.



New Working-Class Studies

Author : John Russo

Publisher : Cornell University Press

Page : 291 pages

File Size : 36,9 MB

Release : 2018-08-06

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1501718576

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Book Description

"We put the working class, in all its varieties, at the center of our work. The new working-class studies is not only about the labor movement, or about workers of any particular kind, or workers in any particular place—even in the workplace. Instead, we ask questions about how class works for people at work, at home, and in the community. We explore how class both unites and divides working-class people, which highlights the importance of understanding how class shapes and is shaped by race, gender, ethnicity, and place. We reflect on the common interests as well as the divisions between the most commonly imagined version of the working class—industrial, blue-collar workers—and workers in the 'new economy' whose work and personal lives seem, at first glance, to place them solidly in the middle class."—from the Introduction In John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon's book, contributors trace the origins of the new working-class studies, explore how it is being developed both within and across fields, and identify key themes and issues. Historians, economists, geographers, sociologists, and scholars of literature and cultural studies introduce many and varied aspects of this emerging field. Throughout, they consider how the study of working-class life transforms traditional disciplines and stress the importance of popular and artistic representations of working-class life.



American Labor Struggles and Law Histories

Author : Kenneth M. Casebeer

Publisher :

Page : 0 pages

File Size : 42,31 MB

Release : 2017

Category : Labor

ISBN : 9781611638721

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Book Description

In more than twenty chapters and interludes, American Labor Struggles and Law Histories narrates the collective actions of workers and how those actions intersected with and were impacted by law, courts, and the police, from a slave revolt in 1712 in New York City and the first casualties in the American Revolution to contemporary actions such as supply chain pressures on Walmart. New chapters include tying together the West and East Coast organizing drives of the CIO in 1935, present-day issues affecting Wisconsin public workers, and efforts to resist wage theft.



Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta

Author : Michael Pierce

Publisher : University of Arkansas Press

Page : 249 pages

File Size : 37,68 MB

Release : 2022-05-30

Category : History

ISBN : 1610757750

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Book Description

Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta examines the history of labor relations and racial conflict in the Mississippi Valley from the Civil War into the late twentieth century. This essay collection grew out of a conference marking the hundredth anniversary of one of the nation’s deadliest labor conflicts—the 1919 Elaine Massacre, during which white mobs ruthlessly slaughtered over two hundred African Americans across Phillips County, Arkansas, in response to a meeting of unionized Black sharecroppers. The essays here demonstrate that the brutality that unfolded in Phillips County was characteristic of the culture of race- and labor-based violence that prevailed in the century after the Civil War. They detail how Delta landowners began seeking cheap labor as soon as the slave system ended—securing a workforce by inflicting racial terror, eroding the Reconstruction Amendments in the courts, and obstructing federal financial-relief efforts. The result was a system of peonage that continued to exploit Blacks and poor whites for their labor, sometimes fatally. In response, laborers devised their own methods for sustaining themselves and their communities: forming unions, calling strikes, relocating, and occasionally operating outside the law. By shedding light on the broader context of the Elaine Massacre, Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta reveals that the fight against white supremacy in the Delta was necessarily a fight for better working conditions, fair labor practices, and economic justice.



"We Called Each Other Comrade"

Author : Allen Ruff

Publisher : PM Press

Page : 548 pages

File Size : 40,63 MB

Release : 2011-07-01

Category : History

ISBN : 1604865725

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Book Description

This is the history of the most significant translator, publisher, and distributor of left-wing literature in the United States. Based in Chicago and still publishing, Charles H. Kerr & Company began in 1886 as a publisher of Unitarian tracts. The company's focus changed after its founder, the son of abolitionist activists, became a socialist at the turn of the century. Tracing Kerr's political development and commitment to radical social change, "We Called Each Other Comrade" also tells the story of the difficulties of exercising the First Amendment in an often hostile business and political climate. A fascinating exploration in left-wing culture, this revealing chronicle of Charles H. Kerr and his revolutionary publishing company looks at the remarkable list of books, periodicals, and pamphlets that the firm produced and traces the strands of a rich tradition of dissent in America.



Organizing the Curriculum

Author :

Publisher : BRILL

Page : 294 pages

File Size : 31,21 MB

Release : 2019-02-11

Category : Education

ISBN : 9087907206

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Book Description

Contemporary American youth live in a culture that ignores or denigrates labor unions. Mainstream media cover labor issues only sparingly and unions no longer play much of a role in popular culture texts, films, or images. In our schools labor has been limited to a footnote in textbooks instead of being treated seriously as the most effective force for championing the rights of working people—the vast majority of the citizenry.